The Future of Workplaces

Imagine coming to office from a long commute, being greeted with a warm hello, having the coffee maker brew your favorite coffee, turning on the lights and the AC in your cabin to your preferred settings and having the entire day’s schedule chalked out in front of you, at your command! Who wouldn’t want such a positive start for their day?

Wake up, guys! This is no longer a distant dream but near future of the workplace and would soon be a reality with smart assistants like Alexa and Google home. The concept of smart homes and devices has been there for quite some time now. We have been using smart assistants to order our meals, play our favorite songs, make shopping lists and navigate to our favorite destinations. In fact, real estate agents these days are integrating virtual assistants with homes and inviting potential home buyers with home automation and security solutions. These smart solutions work because they cater to two crucial aspects of living – safety and security and comfort of the buyers. It is a well-known fact that almost one-third of our lives are spent at work so why not leverage technology to add safety, comfort, and convenience to our workspace? For millennials who have grown up with technology adept in using Amazon, Swiggy, Flipkart, Uber apps at their fingertips, workplace automation is the next logical step in improving their lives.

While the future of work is one of the hottest topics of discussion, it is often debatable. There are several speculations about how artificial intelligence (AI) and robotics will affect our jobs, skills, and income. Will technology take away our jobs or make us more productive? If you look at history, there were similar speculations about the industrial revolution where people were then concerned about machines taking over their jobs. Back then, machines helped humans perform strenuous or mechanical tasks like digging wells, or transporting heavy goods or assembling products. However, machines today, equipped with newer technologies like Machine Learning (MI) and Artificial Intelligence (AI) are way smarter. They no longer automate routine tasks but they seem to be doing wholly different things and opening up new possibilities. Machines today can perform cognitive tasks using tacit knowledge- tasks which don’t necessarily involve a fixed set of instructions to be performed in a sequence, they are actually learning to do something—they can discover patterns, and find innovative solutions on their own. So what exactly will change?

The future workspace will no longer be confined to a physical space and working hours won’t be restricted to a nine to five relic. A smart office would be more of a virtual construct, a collaborative, well connected comfortable co-working space located literally anywhere in the world. Work hours will be spaced out to accommodate workers’ lives. Smart devices like intelligent sensors and network edge devices will be used to create more personalized and less interruptive workspaces. To accommodate a variable number of co-workers in a shared office space, configuring workplace settings like lighting, AC, desktop settings as per each user will be of utmost importance. Future offices will have cloud connectivity implemented inside devices like ACs, coffee machines, printers, elevators and lighting systems to make configurations on the fly, reducing wait times and optimizing working conditions.

According to Gartner research, there are six assertions to how we will work in 2028:

Stay tuned for our next blog where we uncover some use cases on workspace automation.

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